Eric Temple Bell predicted Karl Seldon [sort of].
Dear
Reader,
Eric Temple Bell predicted Karl Seldon!
He did so in 1937, well before Karl Seldon’s birth, but
soon after Kurt Gödel’s proofs of the ‘“self-inconsistency OR self-incompleteness”’
of any mathematical axiomatic systems capable of formulating at least “Natural”
Numbers arithmetic, or more. It was such
theorems -- by Gödel, by Löwenheim and Skolem, etc. -- that launched what
Seldon calls “the [then-inadvertently] dialectical, immanent
critique, or self-critique, of modern mathematics.”
Eric Temple Bell stated this prediction
in chapter twenty-five of his famous book on mathematics history, and of
mathematicians’ short biographies, entitled -- with all of the male chauvinism
of his times -- “Men of Mathematics: The Lives and Achievements of the Great
Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincare”.
No mention of Hypatia here, not to mention of Sophie Germain, or of Emmy
Noether, or of Sofya Kovalevskaya.
Chapter twenty-five, “The Doubter”, contains Bell’s short
biography of the arch anti-Cantorian, Leopold Kronecker.
Bell’s prediction of the core ‘biography’ of our
Karl Seldon is stated in a single paragraph on page 469 of that book, the
third page of that chapter, as follows --
“Kronecker’s university career was a repetition on a
larger scale of his years at school: he
attended lectures on the classics and the sciences and indulged his bent for philosophy
by profounder studies than any he had as yet undertaken, particularly in the
system of Hegel. The last is emphasized
because some curious and competent reader may be moved to seek the origin of
Kronecker’s mathematical heresies in the abstrusities of Hegel’s dialectic -- a
quest wholly beyond the powers of the present writer. Nevertheless there is a strange similarity
between some of the weird unorthodoxies of recent doubts concerning the
self-consistency of mathematics -- doubts for which Kronecker’s “revolution”
was partly responsible -- and the subtleties of Hegel’s system. The ideal candidate for such an
undertaking would be a Marxian communist with a sound training in Polish
many-valued logic, though in what incense tree this rare bird is to be sought
God only knows.” [italics emphasis added by M.D.].
Thus, Eric Temple Bell predicted Karl Seldon -- sort of.
Indeed, the NQ arithmetic/algebra for dialectics, discovered by Karl
Seldon on 7 April 1996, can be well-described, in its interpretation
as a ‘contra-Boolean’
arithmetic, with
a ‘contra-Boolean
algebra’, not
merely as a “many-valued logic”, but as a potentially ‘infinivalent’ algebraic dialectical logic,
and, moreover, as a potentially
‘infinite-dimensional logic’, both in terms of
something like Aristotle’s concept of potential infinity, not “actual infinity” à la Cantorian mysticism.
Much of the work of Karl Seldon, and of his collaborators,
including work by yours truly, is available for free-of-charge download via --
Regards,
Miguel Detonacciones,
Member, F.E.D.,
Officer, F.E.D.
Office of Public Liaison
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